Did Regionalism Kill the World Trade Organization?

Did Regionalism Kill the World Trade Organization? | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Did Regionalism Kill the World Trade Organization? Christopher Magee This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-7436838/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Under Review Version 1 posted 5 You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract For over 60 years, scholars have theorized about whether regional trade agreements would encourage countries to participate more in multilateral trade negotiations or would undermine those trade talks. There are theoretical arguments on both sides of this debate but little empirical work has been done because of the difficulty of measuring how committed countries have been to multilateralism. This paper presents a novel way to measure country cooperation with the WTO using an events dataset of news reports. Positive signals of cooperation with multilateralism include reports that a country praised the WTO, made appeals to it, expressed an intention to cooperate, or engaged in WTO negotiations or consultations. Negative signals, indicating a lack of cooperation, include reports of countries making demands, complaints, or threats toward the WTO or of countries rejecting WTO proposals. Using stochastic frontier analysis, fixed effects, and instrumental variables models, the paper estimates the relationship between measures of regionalism and country cooperation with the WTO. In this way, the paper provides one of the first tests of how regionalism affects countries’ commitment to multilateralism. JEL classification: F10 regionalism multilateralism preferential trade agreements events data Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 1. Introduction The World Trade Organization (WTO) began in 1995 with great hopes. Over the 50 years following the end of World War II, trade had been liberalized through eight different rounds of negotiations under the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Uruguay Round, which ended in 1994, had established the WTO as a formal organization to oversee future trade talks and had given it more power to resolve disputes between countries. Although few would realize it at the time, however, the Uruguay Round would prove to be the high point of multilateralism (Romanchyshyna, 2023 ). It took six years following the formation of the WTO before an agreement was reached in 2001 at the Doha Ministerial to begin a new round of trade talks. Conflicts between developed and developing nations made progress in the negotiations difficult, however, and the talks eventually collapsed in July 2008. Kerr ( 2023 ) describes the WTO as being unable to find any wind in its sails to generate forward momentum in trade talks: “the organization has been becalmed for approximately two-thirds of its existence. It has made almost no progress in fulfilling its primary mission.” While Kerr compares trade negotiations to a ship, others have compared them to riding a bicycle: “the ‘bicycle theory,’ of course, is simply that like a bicycle, the world trading system must always go forward. For if it ever stops going forward, it will surely fall and fail.” (Bacchus, 2003 , p. 429) The first 50 years after World War II illustrated the successful bike riding, with regionalism and multilateralism progressing together (Baldwin, 2016 ). The last thirty years, however, have shown the stalling, falling, and failing. Baldwin ( 2016 , p. 95) notes that the WTO is perceived to be “suffering from a deep malaise,” and he describes the Doha Round of WTO negotiations as having “staggered between failures, flops, and false dawns since it was launched in 2001.” Elliott ( 2018 ) characterizes the Doha Round as being in a “zombie-like state – not alive but also not dead and fully buried.” The tariffs that President Trump announced in April 2025 might one day be considered the death warrant of the WTO. Those tariffs violated the core nondiscrimination principle of the WTO while also being inconsistent with nearly every trade agreement the world’s largest country has signed under its auspices. Indeed, Froman ( 2025 ) declares that “the World Trade Organization has effectively ceased to function, as it fails to negotiate, monitor, or enforce member commitments.” The decline of multilateralism since the mid-1990s has been occurring at the same time that countries have negotiated increasing numbers of preferential trade agreements. The earliest preferential agreements tended to be signed between regional trading partners, so this trend has become known as regionalism. This paper will refer to these preferential deals as regional trade agreements (RTAs) even though many of the recent agreements are between countries, such as the United States and South Korea, that are on opposite sides of the globe. 2 Fig. 1 shows the rise of regional trade agreements in the world trading system. Beginning with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, there was a first wave of regionalism in which intra-RTA trade rose from essentially nothing to 33% of world trade by 1973. After stalling for over a decade, regionalism surged again beginning in the mid-1980s and has continued apace ever since. In the most recent data, nearly 60% of world trade occurs within some form of preferential trade agreement. In the data set used in this paper, the average country went from having a little over 9 RTA partners in 1995 to over 33 preferential partners in 2024. The surge in regionalism extended to include nearly every country around the world. By 2011, every WTO member except Mongolia belonged to at least one regional trade agreement (WTO, 2011). Scholars have long worried that regional agreements would undermine the multilateral trade talks. That fear emerged nearly as soon as countries began negotiating regional agreements in the aftermath of World War II. Dam ( 1963 ) notes that the regional agreements being signed in the 1950s and early 1960s, “far from being halfway houses on the road to non-discriminatory and freer trade, may be in direct conflict with those goals.” Metaphors abound in describing the impact of regionalism on multilateralism. In a memorable phrase, Bhagwati ( 1992 ) asked the question: “Is regionalism truly a building, rather than a stumbling, bloc towards multilateral free trade for all?” Winters ( 2011 ) asks whether regionalism is a “friend or foe” of the multilateral system. Schiff and Winters ( 2005 ) suggest that regional agreements can either be stepping stones to global free trade or millstones around the neck of multilateralism. Whatever metaphor one uses, it is now more than 60 years after Dam ( 1963 ) raised the question of how regionalism would affect the multilateral process, and we still do not have a definitive answer. Source: Author’s calculation based on IMF Direction of Trade Statistics trade data and WTO data on preferential agreements Has regionalism contributed to the difficulties the WTO has faced? Despite the numerous theoretical papers evaluating how regionalism might affect multilateralism, relatively few empirical studies have been done because of the difficulty of measuring how committed each country is to the multilateral process. Probably the most convincing empirical studies on this topic such as Limao (2006) use reductions in a country’s MFN tariff levels as a proxy for its commitment to multilateralism. This paper uses a different, and more direct, measure of how countries cooperate with the WTO by observing the thousands of country actions related to the WTO every year as they participate in trade negotiations, make positive or negative statements about trade talks, reject or accept trade proposals, etc. These actions are captured in an events data set that records news reports of country behaviors and statements related to the WTO. In doing so, it allows one of the first direct tests of how regionalism affects countries’ commitment to the WTO process. The goal of the paper is to contribute toward our understanding of how regionalism affects multilateralism and whether the growth of preferential trade agreements contributed to the decline of the WTO. 2. Theory on how regionalism affects multilateralism 2.1 Harmful effects of regionalism Bhagwati ( 1992 , p. 554), after laying out the basic question of whether regional agreements are “building blocs” or “stumbling blocs” on the path to free trade, comes down firmly on the side of the latter, concluding that “the revival of regionalism is unfortunate.” Later, Bhagwati (2008) describes regional agreements as “termites in the trading system” and describes some political reasons they harm multilateralism. One is that the possibility of regional agreements diverts exporters’ lobbying efforts away from supporting multilateral liberalization toward supporting regional agreements. Second, there are limited numbers of skilled bureaucratic trade negotiators and RTA talks divert their time and energy away from WTO rounds. Third, politicians have a limited amount of political capital that they can spend on pushing trade deals across the line. RTAs allow them to claim success in striking (less important) regional trade deals so they have less incentive to focus their political capital on concluding the more important multilateral rounds. In Levy ( 1997 ), citizens vote on trade policy. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem shows that in a capital-abundant country, citizens with low capital-labor ratios may be harmed by trade due to adverse price changes. Suppose that the median voter is such a citizen. The median voter may still be willing to vote for multilateral free trade if the gains from an increased variety of goods outweigh losses from adverse price movements. Consider, however, the case in which the country has the option of signing a regional trade agreement with a partner country that has a similar capital-labor ratio. This would allow the median voter in each country to get some of the gains from increased variety without suffering the losses from Stolper-Samuelson effects. The median voter could thus prefer the regional trade deal to the multilateral one even though multilateral free trade generates larger total gains for the country as a whole. Krishna ( 1998 ) presents a theoretical model of how regional trade agreements can hinder multilateral liberalization. Regional agreements are signed if they receive enough political support from both countries. Consumers benefit from regional agreements but producers may oppose them if the agreement leads to an increase in imports that replaces domestic production (i.e. if there is trade creation). Trade diversion, however, means that increased imports replace trade from countries outside the preferential bloc and thus it does not create any domestic losers. The implication is that countries are more likely to sign regional trade agreements that are trade-diverting because those agreements generate less political resistance. Trade-diverting regional agreements, however, reduce the political feasibility of multilateral liberalization. Such regional agreements create rents within the bloc that are lost if a multilateral trade deal lowering tariffs is agreed to. Albertin ( 2008 ) presents a model in which firms receive greater profits if their country signs a regional trade agreement than if it chooses a global free trade option. An organized lobby of firms give campaign contributions to the policymaker, who cares about both social welfare and contributions. Global free trade maximizes social welfare and would be the policymaker’s choice in the absence of lobbying. If the policymaker cares enough about campaign money, however, the organized interest group can offer contributions to get the policy maker to choose a regional trade agreement instead of multilateral free trade. In McLaren ( 2002 ), regionalism leads to investments that are sunk costs in the production of certain goods. A regional trade agreement causes a country become more specialized toward its regional trade bloc partners but less specialized toward the rest of the world. This reduces the demand for multilateral free trade. The anticipation of regionalism leads countries to invest in ways that lead to increased demand for regionalism. When there are sunk costs of investment and frictions in trade negotiations, it is common for models to have two equilibrium outcomes: one with multilateral free trade and the other with a regional trade agreement. If people expect global free trade to be reached, they will invest in the area that their country has a comparative advantage in. Every country becomes highly specialized and the ex post gains from multilateral trade liberalization are large. If people expect to have an RTA, they anticipate that goods produced by countries outside the bloc will be expensive so they invest in sectors that nonbloc countries have a comparative advantage in. They also make sunk cost investments in sectors that will be profitable under an RTA. In that case, the ex post gains from multilateral liberalization are smaller relative to the gains from the RTA. If there are higher transaction costs to negotiating a multilateral agreement, the possibility of the RTA could lead to investments that mean it is eventually preferred to global trade liberalization. Limao (2006) outlines a model in which a large country offers a tariff preference to an RTA partner country in exchange for cooperation on nontrade issues. If the country reduces its MFN tariff to zero, it is unable to offer this tariff preference. The potential for countries to offer tariff preferences in regional agreements thus gives countries an incentive to keep their MFN tariffs higher than they would otherwise choose to do. Winters ( 2015 ) argues that regionalism “has been systemically harmful” to multilateralism. One main reason is that the WTO has found it difficult to deal with policy areas such as non-trade barriers, investment, and intellectual property that have become increasingly important trade considerations as tariff levels have fallen. As a result, countries have turned away from multilateral negotiations to regional agreements to address concerns over those policies. Countries have also sought to form mega-regionals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the goal of forming a large enough coalition to be able to dictate terms to other countries rather than engaging in the multilateral process. Lewis ( 2023 ) calls into question the relevance of the World Trade Organization today. She argues that regionalism has had a mixed impact on the WTO over the years. During times when the multilateral system has been flexible enough to accommodate countries’ goals, regional agreements “have not detracted, and may have helped, further the multilateral endeavours.” (Lewis, 2023 , p. 111) Countries have turned to regionalism, however, during times when the multilateral forums have stalled, as they are at present. 2.2 Beneficial effects of regionalism Baldwin ( 1993 ) presents a “domino” theory of regionalism. When a set of countries signs a regional trade agreement, it harms the firms outside the trading bloc who had been exporting to the RTA countries. Those exporters have a profit motive to push their governments to join the RTA, and some new countries join. This expansion of the RTA creates more political pressure on other countries to join, which leads to further enlargement. Free trade within regional trading blocs could spread rapidly under this process. Bergstrand, Egger, and Larch ( 2016 ) find some evidence supporting this argument. They show that new regional trade agreements are more likely to be signed (or existing ones enlarged) during periods of time when there is a greater level of regionalism in the rest of the world. Thus, regionalism can generate its own momentum. Baldwin ( 2016 ) describes a world in which regionalism and multilateralism can work together. Both strengthen exporting sectors while weakening import-competing industries, which shifts political power toward groups in favor of further trade liberalization. Regional trade agreements may also encourage countries outside of regional trading blocs to push for broad tariff reductions. Baldwin ( 2016 ) suggests that European integration encouraged the US and Japan to seek multilateral tariff cuts so their firms would not be at such a large disadvantage in trying to sell their goods into Europe. Elliott ( 2018 ) also discusses the contention that European integration spurred the United States to support multilateral negotiations. Likewise, Bergsten ( 1996 ) argued that the NAFTA negotiations demonstrated that the US had alternative trade options, which put pressure on holdouts in the Uruguay Round and helped bring it to a conclusion. Aghion et al. ( 2007 ) present a model of bargaining in which a country decides whether to negotiate simultaneously with all of the other countries in the world at once or to negotiate free trade agreements with subsets of countries. The model shows that regionalism can act as either a stumbling block or building block toward free trade. Under certain circumstances, global free trade is attainable only if regional trade agreements are allowed. In other cases, however, global free trade can be achieved only if regionalism is prohibited. Pomfret (2021) argues that modern regional agreements do not weaken the WTO. Instead, they are attempts to solve the problem that the WTO framework is unable to progress toward deep agreements because it requires consensus. Modern regional agreements are aimed at facilitating trade and often include measures, such as simplified customs procedures, that are non-discriminatory. Because MFN tariffs have been reduced to such low levels in recent decades, the tariff preferences given in regional trade deals often have little effect. With a bureaucratic cost of qualifying for tariff preferences due to rules of origin, exporters often find it is cheaper to pay the low MFN tariff than to seek the tariff preference. Thus, the impacts of modern regional agreements do not come about because of bilateral tariff reductions, and they are not a threat to multilateral tariff negotiations. Ornelas ( 2005 ) suggests that regional trade agreements cause participating countries to lower their external tariffs. Ornelas presents a model of an oligopolistic industry that lobbies the government for tariff protection. Tariffs lead to a higher market share for the domestic firms in the oligopoly. A regional trade agreement means that some of the higher market share from external tariffs goes to RTA partner country firms. This reduces the gain to domestic firms of high external tariffs and reduces the incentive of the government to raise tariffs as well as reducing the political contributions that firms are willing to give for high external tariffs. Thus, external tariffs fall with an RTA. In the model, a regional trade agreement lowers campaign contributions so it is only feasible politically if it raises welfare. Welfare consideration become more important in determining trade policy so it is less likely that campaign contributions would be used by firms to block a multilateral trade deal that is welfare enhancing. Overall, then, regional trade agreements enhance support for multilateralism by reducing the role of special interests in government’s trade decisions. 2.3 Empirical results on how regionalism affects multilateralism The few empirical studies that have been done on this topic usually examine how a country’s most-favored nation (MFN) tariffs change in response to its participation in regional trade agreements. Limao (2006) was, to my knowledge, the first paper to estimate the effect of regionalism on multilateralism empirically. He did so by comparing US tariff reductions in the Uruguay Round on goods that the United States imported from RTA countries to tariff reductions on goods that it imported from non-RTA countries. The US reduced its multilateral tariffs less for goods that imported from RTA trading partners than it did for other goods. This result suggests that regionalism acted as a stumbling bloc to multilateral liberalization for the United States. It supports the prediction from his model that countries have incentives to maintain higher MFN tariffs on goods that they import from RTA partners. Calvo-Pardo et al. ( 2009 ), on the other hand, find that preferential trade reductions by ASEAN countries led them to reduce their MFN tariffs. They argue that this effect is a causal one and thus, ASEAN contributed to broader trade liberalization. Similarly, Estevadeordal et al. ( 2008 ) find that Latin American countries reduced their MFN tariffs in a sector more if they had granted preferential tariff reductions in that sector through regional trade agreements. They conclude that the fears of a stumbling bloc effect of regionalism are unfounded. Foroutan ( 1998 ) also shows that the Latin American countries that were in effective regional trade agreements had lower average tariff rates and reduced their tariffs more than did other Latin American countries. She argues, however, that the causality does not run from RTAs leading to open trade regimes but rather that an open trade regime is necessary for the development of a meaningful RTA. Libman ( 2024 ) looks at how the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union affected its countries’ interactions with the WTO. He finds that the regional agreement did not reduce countries’ interest in becoming WTO members or constrain them in their WTO negotiations. Azmeh ( 2024 ) notes that the building bloc logic is that outsiders demand more multilateral liberalization to reduce negative effects of RTA tariff preferences imposed on them by other countries’ regional trade agreements. The stumbling bloc logic is that the insiders get gains from regional agreements that make them less eager to participate in multilateral liberalization. The empirical papers described above, as well as this paper, are looking at the effects of regionalism on the participant countries (i.e., the insider countries). An alternative might examine the MFN tariffs or cooperation with the WTO by countries that are excluded from regional agreements. Theoretically, the latter group of outsiders should show an increased cooperation in multilateral trade deals negotiated through the WTO. Azmeh ( 2024 ) finds in interviews with 60 different WTO member states, however, that insider countries who entered into regional agreements with the US, EU, and China were highly supportive of efforts to break the gridlock in the WTO. 3. Data and Empirical Method This paper measures a country’s level of cooperation with the WTO using the GDELT events dataset, which uses machine reading of news sources to identify the actors and actions in each story. In recent years, the GDELT dataset reads in well over 100,000 events each day which means that approximately 50 million events are recorded over the course of a year. Each event is classified using the CAMEO coding system and Goldstein ( 1992 ) provides a score measuring how cooperative or conflictual the action in each event code is. The Goldstein score was based on the average ratings of net cooperation for each event type from a panel of eight international relations scholars, where the scale ranged from extreme conflict (-10) to extreme cooperation (10). A common way of measuring cooperation between entities is to sum the values of the Goldstein scores for each event between the two parties. Reuveny and Kang ( 1998 ), for instance, use the sum of Goldstein scores across all events involving two particular countries to measure cooperation between the country pair. The overall level of cooperation is thus a weighted average of each interaction, where the weights indicate how conflictual or cooperative the interaction is. Since 1995, there have been over 38,000 events in the GDELT data set in which the source was a country and the target actor was the World Trade Organization. The events used to measure each country’s cooperation with the WTO are listed in Table 1 . The most common event involving the WTO was when a country engaged in negotiations, which occurred in the data set over 4,000 different times. Negotiations were part of the broader category of consulting, and countries consulted with the WTO over 10,000 times in the dataset. Other common cooperative actions included expressing an intent to cooperate with the WTO, which happened over 5,000 times, and making an appeal, which happened over 4,400 times. Conflictual actions included making demands of the WTO, issuing official complaints or threats toward it, expressing disapproval, and halting negotiations. This paper sums the Goldstein scores for all the events listed in Table 1 over the course of the year where the WTO was the target actor to measure each country’s yearly cooperation with the WTO. Negative values for the variable indicate that the country’s interactions with the WTO tend to be conflictual in that year while positive values indicate a more cooperative relationship. Each country’s cooperation with the WTO depends on many factors. The one this paper focuses on is how much the country has participated in signing regional trade agreements. One way to measure a country’s emphasis on regionalism is to count the number of partners with whom the country has a preferential trade agreement at the start of the year. In a regression of the country’s cooperation with the WTO on the number of its RTA partners, the coefficient on the latter variable is a measure of how each new preferential trading partner affects the country’s cooperation with the WTO. Another possible measure of regionalism is the fraction of a country’s trade in the previous year that occurs within a preferential trading bloc. A positive coefficient on these variables would suggest that a larger share of intra-RTA trade as a fraction of total trade promotes countries’ participation in the multilateral trade negotiations while a negative coefficient would indicate that regionalism hinders multilateralism. The coefficient estimate on the regionalism variable thus provides a preliminary answer about whether regionalism is a friend or a foe of multilateralism, a building bloc or a stumbling bloc toward free trade, and a stepping stone toward free trade or a millstone around the neck of multilateralism. Other factors that could affect a country’s cooperation with the WTO are controlled for in the model. Interactions with the WTO may change over time for all countries based on worldwide conditions and trends, so the models include a fixed effect for each year to control for time-specific factors. The size of the country and their income level may also matter, so the regressions include the log of GDP and the log of GDP per capita in the previous year. Some countries in the data set are members of the WTO while other countries are not, so the control variables include a dummy variable for WTO membership at the start of the year. The regressions also control for two aspects of the country’s government coming from the V-Dem data project (Coppedge et al., 2024). One is an index ranging from zero to one measuring how democratic the country is during the year based on freedom of association, clean elections, freedom of expression, elected officials, and suffrage. The other variable measures the ideology of the government as indicated by the fraction of the data project’s coders who characterize the ideology of the country’s chief executive as socialist or communist. There may also be unobserved factors specific to each country that affect how cooperative or conflictual their interactions with the WTO are. If these factors remain constant over time, we can control for them by including a fixed effect for each country in the regressions. Thus, some of the models in this paper include country fixed effects. Heteroskedasticity is a concern in this application. Activities of larger (and richer) countries are reported more closely in the media and thus there are likely to be many more observations in the events data set detailing interactions between large countries and the WTO. There are more cooperative events than conflictual ones in the events data set, so this could push the cooperation measure upward for larger and richer countries. The regressions include both log GDP and log GDP per capita to control for the effect of this potential overreporting of larger countries on the dependent variable. But overreporting will also mean that there is wider variation of cooperation with the WTO among large countries than among small ones, who have relatively few events and whose cooperation scores tend to be closer to zero on average. In the data, tests of heteroskedasticity proposed by Breusch and Pagan ( 1979 ) strongly reject the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity. The standard errors calculated for the coefficient estimates are thus adjusted to account for heteroskedasticity. Long and Ervin ( 2000 ) discuss the properties of different estimators of the standard errors. Another potential econometric concern is measurement error. In this situation, we do not observe the true level of cooperation between a country and the WTO. Instead, we have an estimate of cooperation based on news reports about the country’s actions. Millimet and Parmeter ( 2022 ) note that classic random measurement error in the dependent variable does not create biased coefficient estimates in a linear model, though it does mean that the coefficients are estimated with less precision. They show, however, that measurement error in the dependent variable can lead to biased coefficient estimates if the measurement error is either one-sided or skewed with a non-zero mean. It is possible that measurement error skews the WTO cooperation variable in a positive direction if countries openly tout their cooperative behavior and participation in WTO negotiations but hide their obstruction of those negotiations. With skewed measurement error in the dependent variable, the estimate of the intercept will be biased and it is possible that estimates of the slope coefficients will be biased as well if the measurement error is heteroskedastic. Millimet and Parmeter ( 2022 ) recommend stochastic frontier analysis as a method of estimating coefficients in the presence of skewed measurement error in the dependent variable. Perhaps the most important econometric issue the estimation needs to confront is endogeneity of the regionalism variable. Countries choose how much they participate in regionalism and multilateralism simultaneously, so those are not two separate decisions. Even though the regionalism variables are lagged by one year, that does not resolve the issue that the number of a country’s preferential trading partners is jointly determined with its participation in the multilateral process. This paper addresses endogeneity in the regionalism variable by estimating models using two-stage least squares, a form of instrumental variables (IV). The IV models require identification of instruments that affect the endogenous variable but have no direct impact on the dependent variable. In this case, that means we need variables affecting how many preferential trading partners the country has but not directly affecting its cooperation with the WTO. This paper uses two instruments. The first is based on the tendency of a country’s major trading partners to sign regional trade agreements. For each country, the ten largest trading partners were identified. The instrument is the average number of preferential trade agreements (other than with the country itself) that these ten largest trading partners had at the start of the previous year. A large number for this instrument means that the country’s major trading partners tended to sign many preferential agreements, which would mean the country has ample opportunity to engage in regionalism if it chooses. This instrument is strongly correlated with the number of the country’s own preferential trading partners but should not theoretically (and does not empirically) affect the country’s cooperation with the WTO. For the second instrument, I estimate a gravity model using a dataset of the world’s dyads predicting the probability that two countries will have a regional trade agreement in a given year. The instrument is the sum of the predicted probabilities of an RTA over all the other countries in the data set. There are a number of papers that have developed models of RTA formation, including Magee ( 2003 ), Baier and Bergstrand ( 2004 ), and Baldwin and Jaimovich (2012). These papers show that a pair of countries is more likely to have a regional trade agreement if they are large economies, near each other geographically, share a common border, speak the same language, are remote from other countries in the world, share similar political systems, and have a similar economic size. This paper’s model of RTA formation includes these variables, a dummy variable for a shared colonial history, and an alliance indicator variable described in Leeds et al. ( 2002 ). Table 2 presents estimates of a probit model of RTA formation. Though not shown, the regression also includes dummy variables for each year. As the estimates show, a pair of countries is significantly more likely to have a regional trade agreement if they are near each other geographically, speak the same language, share a common colonial history, have a military alliance with each other, have large and rich economies that are similar in size and income, are both democracies, and are remote from other countries with large economies. These results are intuitive and are consistent with previous research on RTA formation. The explanatory variables do well in predicting which countries are likely to have regional trade agreements as shown by the pseudo-R 2 of 0.43. The next section discusses several different tests of instrument validity when presenting the results of the instrumental variable estimation. 4. Results Table 3 presents the results of estimating the empirical model. Following Millimet and Parmeter ( 2022 ), the coefficients are estimated using stochastic frontier analysis. The first two columns use the number of regional trading partners a country has to measure its emphasis on regionalism. The last two columns measure regionalism as the percentage of the country’s total trade that comes from RTA partner countries. Columns 2 and 4 in the table include fixed effects for each country to control for the effects of unmeasured country characteristics that are constant over time. As the table shows, the coefficients on the regionalism variables are negative and statistically significant at the 5% level or better in all four of the regressions. In column 1, each extra RTA partner country reduces the country’s measured cooperation with the WTO by 0.27. The coefficient is statistically significant at the 1% level, but is the effect a meaningful one? A decline of 0.27 would be a 2.6% fall from the average level of cooperation. In terms of standardized coefficients, a rise of one standard deviation in the number of RTA partners reduces a country’s cooperation with the WTO by 0.12 standard deviations. The estimated effect, while not negligible, is relatively moderate in size. If country fixed effects are included, as in column 2, the coefficient on the RTA partner variable remains statistically significant and negative but the coefficient on the number of RTA partners falls in magnitude to -0.14. Similar results emerge in columns 3 and 4 measuring regionalism using the share of the country’s trade that comes from other RTA partners. Without the country fixed effects, a one percentage point increase in the RTA share of a country’s trade reduces the country’s cooperation with the WTO by 0.26 points. A one standard deviation rise in the RTA share of trade reduces cooperation with the WTO by 0.12 standard deviations. Thus, measuring regionalism by the RTA trade share and by the number of RTA partners give very similar results. Including country fixed effects reduces the impact of regionalism on WTO cooperation between models 3 and 4, though the effect remains statistically significant at the 1% level. In the fixed effects model, a one standard deviation increase in the RTA share of trade reduces cooperation with the WTO by 0.04 standard deviations. One way to get a sense of the total impact of regionalism on countries’ relationships with the WTO is to estimate how the WTO cooperation variable would have evolved over time had there been no increase in regional trade agreements. We can use the coefficient estimates in Table 3 to answer this counterfactual. For these calculations, I use the model in column 1 to generate a predicted level of country cooperation with the WTO based on the actual values of the variables in each country. I then generate a counterfactual where all the other variables in the regression evolve over time as they did in reality but the number of RTA partners each country has remains fixed at its level at the start of the year 1995. Figure 2 shows the average predicted WTO cooperation levels across all countries for each year based on these calculations. The solid line shows the average country cooperation with the WTO given the upward trend in regionalism that actually occurred. As the figure shows, predicted cooperation with the WTO peaked in 2016 at an average value of approximately 26.6 and then fell to an average value of 4.6 by 2023. The dashed line in the figure shows the model’s prediction of what average cooperation with the WTO would have been had there been no new regional trade agreements signed after the WTO began in January 1995. Without the trend toward more regional agreements, cooperation with the WTO would have been considerably better. At its peak in 2016, cooperation would have been 24% better without the new RTAs signed since 1995. The model predicts that without the trend toward regionalism, the 2023 level of cooperation with the WTO would have been at an average value of 12.6, which is above the average value of cooperation in the dataset. With regionalism, however, cooperation with the WTO fell to a value in 2023 (4.6) that represents the worst cooperation with the WTO after its first year in existence. The conclusions about the effects of the control variables depend on whether country fixed effects are included in the estimation. In the first column, the coefficients on log GDP and democracy suggests that larger countries are significantly more cooperative with the WTO than smaller countries are while democracies are significantly less cooperative with the WTO. Those two coefficient estimates become statistically insignificant, however, when country fixed effects are added to the model in column 2. The lack of significance may be due to relative stability in these two explanatory variables over time. The fixed effect estimation examines how changes in the explanatory variable over time are related to changes in their cooperation with the WTO. There tend to be only relatively small changes in a country’s level of democracy from year to year, for instance, so it is difficult to estimate how changes in democracy affect changes in the country’s WTO cooperation. Column 1 reveals a significant positive coefficient on the socialist government variable, but the coefficient drops close to zero when country fixed effects are added. This combination suggests that while countries that usually elect socialist governments tend to cooperate relatively well with the WTO, a change in the ideology of the government has no significant impact on its cooperation. Interestingly, countries that are not members of the WTO yet are more cooperative toward the organization than countries that are already in it. The significant negative coefficient remains when country fixed effects are included, which suggests that even controlling for unobserved country characteristics, joining the WTO reduces the country’s cooperation with the organization. One explanation for this result is that the non-WTO countries may be hoping to be admitted into the organization so they withhold criticism of it until after they have been allowed in. China, for instance, was measured as being very cooperative toward the WTO in 1999, 2000, and 2001 as it negotiated its entry into the organization. Its cooperation then dropped to more normal (but still positive) levels of cooperation in the next few years. The result is not being driven by China, however. Even if China is omitted from the analysis, non-WTO countries cooperate more with the WTO than do those already in the organization. Table 4 presents two-stage least squares analysis of the effects of regionalism on WTO cooperation, treating regionalism as endogenous. The table uses the number of regional trading partners as the measure of regionalism. There are two different variables used as instruments for regionalism. As described in the previous section, the two instruments are the average number of preferential trading partners that the country’s ten largest trading partners have and the predicted total number of RTA partners for the country from a gravity model of RTA formation. Models 1 and 4 include only the first instrument. Models 2 and 5 include only the second instrument. Models 3 and 6 include both instruments. Models 4, 5, and 6 include country fixed effects while Models 1, 2, and 3 do not. One test of instrument validity considers the relevance of the instrument, which is normally evaluated by looking at the F-statistic for the instrument in the first stage regression. Staiger and Stock ( 1997 ) suggest that an instrument should be considered weak if the F-statistic for the instrument in the first stage regression is below 10. Stock and Yogo (2005) provide critical values above which the null hypothesis of a weak instrument can be rejected. The critical values range up to a maximum value of 38 in the regressions in Table 4 . The two instruments used in the two-stage least squares regressions are both very strongly correlated with the number of RTA partners a country has. In the regressions without country fixed effects, the F-statistics for the instruments are above 2,000 in all three regressions. In the models with country fixed effects, the F-statistics are all above 400. In all cases, these are far above the critical values in Stock and Yogo (2005) and they suggest that weak instruments are not a concern here. The Sargan statistic (Sargan, 1958 ) testing the overidentification restrictions on the instruments is not statistically significant, which means that the null hypothesis of valid instruments is not rejected. The coefficient on the RTA partners variable is negative and statistically significant at the 10% level or better in all six IV regressions in Table 4 . The coefficients on the regionalism variable remain very stable across the six regressions, ranging from − 0.35 to -0.55. The estimated negative effect of regionalism on cooperation with the WTO is larger in the IV regression than in Table 3 , which treated regionalism as exogenous to multilateralism. In 2024, the average country had a value for cooperation with the WTO of 6.7. Using the average of the coefficients on the regionalism variable in Table 4 , countries would be predicted to have had an average cooperation with the WTO nearly three times higher (19.8) if there had been no trend upward in RTAs after 1995. That predicted value would have been higher than the actual cooperation values in all but two of the 30 years in the data set. Overall, then, the results provide strong evidence that regionalism hinders multilateralism. 5. Conclusion This paper has presented a test of how the spread of regionalism has affected countries’ levels of cooperation with the WTO and participation in the process of multilateral trade negotiations. It introduces a novel use of an events dataset to measure each country’s cooperation with the WTO from news stories of countries’ participation in WTO negotiations and statements about the WTO. The model estimates fall strongly on the side of scholars who have argued that regionalism is a foe to multilateralism. In all the regressions, which include both country fixed effects and treating RTA choices as endogenous, there is a statistically significant negative coefficient on the variable measuring a country’s participation in regionalism. These results do not necessarily mean that regionalism has blocked the way to global free trade. Global free trade could potentially be reached by several different paths. One is to build on the rounds of multilateral negotiations that were concluded under the GATT. Another is to have each country successively sign more bilateral and plurilateral agreements until eventually each country has a free trade agreement with every other country in the world. This paper suggests that these are two separate paths and that moving down the path of regionalism makes it harder to progress along the multilateral path. It does not, however, necessarily mean that the regionalism path is a dead end. For the WTO, this may be scant consolation. The WTO has suffered a series of blows in recent decades as the Doha Round negotiations were mired in quicksand, the dispute settlement procedures fell apart with the United States blocking the appointment of new appellate court judges, and trade wars have broken out all over during the opening months of the second Trump administration. Perhaps these blows would all have fallen on the WTO even in the absence of regionalism. Nonetheless, this paper provides the first empirical evidence that regionalism turned the relationships between the WTO and countries more conflictual and less cooperative. Regionalism may not have killed the WTO, but it has certainly helped to put it on life support. References Aghion, P., Antràs, P., & Helpman, E. (2007). Negotiating free trade. Journal of International Economics , 73 (1), 1-30. Albertin, G. (2008). Regionalism or multilateralism? A political economy choice. IMF Working Paper 08/65 . Azmeh, S. (2024). ‘Saving the WTO’: middle power insiders and joint statement initiatives at the World Trade Organisation. New Political Economy , 29 (1), 60-74. Bacchus, James. (2003). “The Bicycle Club: Affirming the American Interest in the Future of the WTO. Journal of World Trade , 37(3), 429-441. https://doi.org/10.54648/trad2003023 Baier, S. L., & Bergstrand, J. H. (2004). Economic determinants of free trade agreements. Journal of international Economics , 64 (1), 29-63. Baldwin, R. (1993). A domino theory of regionalism. NBER Working Paper 4465 . Baldwin, R. (2016). The World Trade Organization and the future of multilateralism. Journal of Economic Perspectives , 30 (1), 95-116. Bergsten, C. F. (1996). Competitive liberalization and global free trade: A vision for the 21st century . Institute for International Economics. Bergstrand, J. H., Egger, P., & Larch, M. (2016). Economic determinants of the timing of preferential trade agreement formations and enlargements. Economic Inquiry , 54 (1), 315-341. Bhagwati, J. (1992). Regionalism versus multilateralism. World Economy , 15 (5), 535-556. Breusch, T. S., and Pagan, A. R. (1979) A simple test for heteroscedasticity and random coefficient variation. Econometrica 47, 1287-1294. Calvo-Pardo, H., Freund, C., & Ornelas, E. (2009). The ASEAN free trade agreement: impact on trade flows and external trade barriers. Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Cecilia Borella, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Rydén, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2024. "V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v14" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/mcwt-fr58. Dam, K. W. (1963). Regional economic arrangements and the GATT: the legacy of a misconception. The University of Chicago Law Review , 30 (4), 615-665. Elliott, K. A. (2018). The WTO and regional/bilateral trade agreements. In Handbook of International Trade Agreements (pp. 17-28). Routledge. Estevadeordal, A., Freund, C., & Ornelas, E. (2008). Does regionalism affect trade liberalization toward nonmembers?. The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 123 (4), 1531-1575. Foroutan, F. (1998). Does membership in a regional preferential trade arrangement make a country more or less protectionist? (Vol. 1898). World Bank Publications. Froman, M. (2025). After the Trade War: Remaking Rules from the Ruins of the Rules-Based System. Foreign Affairs 104(5). Goldstein, J. S. (1992). A conflict-cooperation scale for WEIS events data. Journal of Conflict Resolution , 36 (2), 369-385. Kerr, W. A. (2023). Becalmed: The World Trade Organization at Not Yet Thirty. Estey Journal of International Law and Trade Policy , 24 (2), 50-62. Krishna, P. (1998). Regionalism and multilateralism: A political economy approach. The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 113 (1), 227-251. Leeds, B., Ritter, J., Mitchell, S., & Long, A. (2002). Alliance treaty obligations and provisions, 1815-1944. International Interactions , 28 (3), 237-260. Levy, P. I. (1997). A political-economic analysis of free-trade agreements. The American Economic Review , 506-519. Lewis, M. K. (2023). International Trade Agreements: Laboratories of Innovation or Propellers of Fragmentation?. Journal of International Economic Law , 1 , 110-123. Libman, A. (2024). Eurasian regionalism and the WTO: a building block or a stumbling stone? In A. Libman and A. Obydenkova, eds., Global Governance and Interaction between International Institutions (Routledge: New York), pp. 100-118. Limão, N. (2006). Preferential trade agreements as stumbling blocks for multilateral trade liberalization: Evidence for the United States. American Economic Review , 96 (3), 896-914. Long, J. S., & Ervin, L. H. (2000). Using heteroscedasticity consistent standard errors in the linear regression model. The American Statistician , 54 (3), 217-224. Magee, C., 2003, “Endogenous Preferential Trade Agreements: An Empirical Analysis,” Contributions to Economic Analysis & Policy 2 (1), article 15, http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/contributions/vol2/iss1/art15. McLaren, J. (2002). A theory of insidious regionalism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 117 (2), 571-608. Millimet, D. L., & Parmeter, C. F. (2022). Accounting for skewed or one-sided measurement error in the dependent variable. Political Analysis , 30 (1), 66-88. Ornelas, E. (2005). Endogenous free trade agreements and the multilateral trading system. Journal of international Economics , 67 (2), 471-497. Reuveny, R., and H. Kang, 1998, Bilateral Trade and Political Conflict/Cooperation: Do Goods Matter? Journal of Peace Research , vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 581-602. Romanchyshyna, I. (2023). Regionalism and Multilateralism: The WTO Perspective. Technical Barriers to Trade in “New Generation” RTAs and in the WTO Agreements: Conflict or Complementarity? , 47-105. Sargan, J. D. (1958). The estimation of economic relationships using instrumental variables. Econometrica: Journal of the econometric society , 393-415. Schiff, M. W., & Winters, L. A. (2005). Regional Trading Arrangements and Developing Countries. In The World Trade Organization: Legal, Economic and Political Analysis (pp. 1919-1932). Boston, MA: Springer US. Staiger, D., and J. H. Stock (1997). Instrumental variables regression with weak instruments. Econometrica 65, 557–86. Winters, L. (2011). Preferential trading agreements: friend or foe. Preferential Trade Agreements: A Law and Economics Analysis , 7. Winters, L. (2015). The WTO and regional trading agreements: is it all over for multilateralism? European University Institute Working Paper RSCAS 2015/94. Footnotes The WTO (2011) World Trade Report notes that about half of the preferential trade agreements in force are not strictly “regional” since they include countries from different regions of the world. Tables Table 1 Events directed at the World Trade Organization Event Code # of events Goldstein Scale 01 4157 Make a public statement 010 2109 make a statement 0 012 769 make a pessimistic comment -0.4 013 617 make on optimistic comment 0.4 014 363 consider policy option 0 015 34 acknowledge or claim responsibility 0 016 23 deny responsibility -2 017 192 engage in symbolic act 0 018 30 make an empathetic comment 3.4 019 20 express accord 3.4 02 4449 Appeal 020 3666 make an appeal or request 3 021 102 appeal for material cooperation 3.4 0211 1 appeal for economic cooperation 3.4 0213 78 appeal for judicial cooperation 3.4 022 134 appeal for diplomatic cooperation 3.2 023 28 appeal for aid 3.4 025 68 appeal to yield -0.3 026 303 appeal to others to meet or negotiate 4 027 22 appeal to others to settle dispute 4 028 47 appeal to engage in or accept mediation 4 03 5088 Express intent to cooperate 030 2296 express intent to cooperate 4 031 12 express intent to engage in material cooperation 5.2 0311 174 express intent to cooperate economically 5.2 032 207 express intent to engage in diplomatic cooperation 4.5 33 43 express intent to provide material aid 5.2 331 23 express intent to provide economic aid 5.2 34 19 express intent to institute political reform 7 35 70 express intent to yield 7 36 2131 express intent to meet or negotiate 4 37 92 express intent to settle dispute 5 38 1 express intent to accept mediation 7 39 20 express intent to mediate 5 Table 2 A Gravity model of the bilateral determinants of RTA formation 04 10255 Consult 40 3231 consult 1 41 17 discuss by telephone 1 42 1393 make a visit (travel to a location for a meeting) 1.9 43 1407 host a visit 2.8 44 161 meet at a "third" location 2.5 45 31 mediate 5 46 4015 engage in negotiations 7 05 3878 Engage in diplomatic cooperation 50 643 engage in diplomatic cooperation 3.5 51 2434 praise or endorse 3.4 52 26 defend verbally 3.5 53 15 rally support on behalf of 3.8 54 24 grant diplomatic recognition 6 57 736 sign a formal agreement 8 06 932 Engage in material cooperation 60 183 engage in material cooperation 6 61 749 cooperate economically 6.4 07 104 Provide aid 70 104 provide aid 7 08 297 Yield 80 218 yield 5 831 65 accede to demands for change in leadership 5 833 14 accede to demands for rights 5 09 220 Investigate 90 220 investigate -2 10 584 Demand 100 526 demand -5 106 43 demand meeting, negotiation -2.6 1043 15 demand rights -5 11 5413 disapprove 110 702 disapprove -2 111 528 criticize or denounce -2 112 450 accuse -2 113 34 rally opposition against -2 114 3406 complain officially -2 115 293 bring lawsuit against -2 12 1136 Reject 120 746 reject -4 121 3 reject material cooperation -4 1211 1 reject economic cooperation -4 124 6 refuse to yield -4 125 73 reject proposal to meet, discuss, negotiate -5 127 43 reject plan, agreement to settle dispute -5 128 233 defy norms, law -5 129 31 veto -5 13 931 Threaten 130 524 threaten -4.4 131 142 threaten (non-force) -5.8 1313 239 threaten to reduce or break relations -5.8 133 9 threaten with political dissent, protest -5.8 134 6 threaten to halt negotiations -5.8 139 11 give ultimatum -7 14 494 Protest 140 35 engage in political dissent -6.5 141 459 demonstrate or rally -6.5 16 298 Reduce relations 160 84 reduce relations -4 164 210 halt negotiations -7 165 4 halt mediation -6.5 Variable Coefficient Log distance -0.732 *** Contiguous 0.120 Speak a common language 0.294 *** Share a colonial history 0.327 ** Alliance 0.390 *** Sum of log GDP 0.038 *** Sum of log GDP per capita 0.154 *** Difference in log GDP -0.044 *** Difference in log GDP per capita -0.073 *** Remote 0.179 *** Difference in democracy levels -0.567 *** Sum of democracy levels 0.907 *** Observations 409,410 Pseudo- R 2 0.43 The dependent variable equals one if the pair of countries has a regional trade agreement in year t The regression includes year fixed effects *, **, *** indicate that the coefficient is statistically significant at the 10%, 5%, 1% levels, respectively Standard errors are clustered on each country pair Table 3 Determinants of multilateral participation Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 RTA partners -0.27 *** -0.14 ** RTA trade share -25.76 *** -9.38 *** Log GDP per capita -0.06 21.49 ** -0.46 17.54 ** Log GDP 11.27 *** -1.65 11.60 *** 3.79 WTO -11.22 *** -19.62 *** -10.91 *** -18.99 *** Democracy -24.52 *** -6.23 -26.10 *** -4.55 Socialist 39.39 *** 0.92 40.24 *** 1.49 Observations 4,796 4,796 4,771 4,771 Country fixed effects No Yes No Yes The models are estimated using stochastic frontier analysis All the regressions include year fixed effects *, **, *** indicate that the coefficient is statistically significant at the 10%, 5%, 1% levels, respectively Significance levels are based on standard errors that are robust to the presence of heteroskedasticity Table 4 Determinants of multilateral participation, Two-stage least squares Variable Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 RTA partners -0.38 *** -0.48 *** -0.46 *** -0.53 ** -0.55 * -0.54 ** Log GDP per capita 0.68 1.37 * 1.22 37.50 ** 38.06 ** 37.69 ** Log GDP 11.37 *** 11.38 *** 11.40 *** -19.87 * -20.52 -20.08 WTO -11.50 *** -11.42 *** -11.50 *** -20.92 *** -20.92 *** -20.94 *** Democracy -20.64 *** -17.51 *** -18.05 *** -6.69 -6.74 -6.71 Socialist 40.13 *** 40.59 *** 40.56 *** 0.75 0.74 0.75 Observations 4,770 4,776 4,770 4,770 4,776 4,770 F-stat for instruments 2,147 *** 3,915 *** 2,413 *** 511 *** 452 *** 413 *** Sargan overid test 2.49 0.001 Country fixed effects No No No Yes Yes Yes All the regressions include year fixed effects *, **, *** indicate that the coefficient is statistically significant at the 10%, 5%, 1% levels, respectively Significance levels are based on standard errors that are robust to the presence of heteroskedasticity Instruments used in each model Models 1 and 4: Average number of regional trade agreements among the ten largest trading partners Models 2 and 5: Predicted number of regional trade agreements from gravity model estimates Models 3 and 6: Include both instruments Cite Share Download PDF Status: Under Review Version 1 posted Editorial decision: Revisions needed 10 Dec, 2025 Reviewers agreed at journal 03 Sep, 2025 Reviewers invited by journal 03 Sep, 2025 Editor assigned by journal 25 Aug, 2025 First submitted to journal 22 Aug, 2025 You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. Our growing team is made up of researchers and industry professionals working together to solve the most critical problems facing scientific publishing. Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-7436838","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Research Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":509740677,"identity":"af92decf-09e2-4164-b3a7-812d064d4f0e","order_by":0,"name":"Christopher Magee","email":"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAZAAAAAyAQMAAABI0h/eAAAABlBMVEX///8AAABVwtN+AAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAA2ElEQVRIiWNgGAWjYPACmwQGBjYgXWABJBKI0pIG1WIgQbSWwyRo4Z92+PGLDxXn8wyOH0t78AGohZ89xwCvFonbaWaWM87cLjY4k3bccAZQi2TPG/xaDKQTzIx5224nbrjB3ibNA9RicIOALQbS6d+M//47B9HyB6jFnrCWHOPHjA0HgFrYjkmDvG8gQdAvOWWMPceSiyXPpKVJ9hhI8EiceVaAVwv/7PTNH37U2OXxHT9mJvGjwkaOvz15A14tQMAmgczjIaQcBJg/EKNqFIyCUTAKRjAAACY9RZppPMMPAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC","orcid":"https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2622-4005","institution":"Bucknell University","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Christopher","middleName":"","lastName":"Magee","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2025-08-22 18:28:38","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":"","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7436838/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7436838/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[{"id":91058802,"identity":"a2f3125b-ff1e-4272-b22b-3d7af7644ea9","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-11 08:28:02","extension":"jpg","order_by":1,"title":"Figure 1","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":52020,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRegional trade agreement share of world trade\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSource: Author’s calculation based on IMF Direction of Trade Statistics trade data and WTO data on preferential agreements\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"1.jpg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7436838/v1/6e465169d3a6f98a712a151e.jpg"},{"id":91058801,"identity":"3d8ba9ed-7c5e-4dd1-af69-c23dc9a65274","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-11 08:28:01","extension":"jpg","order_by":2,"title":"Figure 2","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":99569,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOverall effect of regionalism on country cooperation with the WTO\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"2.jpg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7436838/v1/8a588ab9b86d38c32c6d4892.jpg"},{"id":91060190,"identity":"3b50eedb-0649-434c-83b9-c6898a96ff40","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-11 08:52:02","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":1106168,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7436838/v1/51e2c08f-0402-4b92-8559-744f0cfea8b7.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"","formattedTitle":"Did Regionalism Kill the World Trade Organization?","fulltext":[{"header":"1. Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eThe World Trade Organization (WTO) began in 1995 with great hopes. Over the 50 years following the end of World War II, trade had been liberalized through eight different rounds of negotiations under the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Uruguay Round, which ended in 1994, had established the WTO as a formal organization to oversee future trade talks and had given it more power to resolve disputes between countries. Although few would realize it at the time, however, the Uruguay Round would prove to be the high point of multilateralism (Romanchyshyna, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR33\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). It took six years following the formation of the WTO before an agreement was reached in 2001 at the Doha Ministerial to begin a new round of trade talks. Conflicts between developed and developing nations made progress in the negotiations difficult, however, and the talks eventually collapsed in July 2008. Kerr (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) describes the WTO as being unable to find any wind in its sails to generate forward momentum in trade talks: \u0026ldquo;the organization has been becalmed for approximately two-thirds of its existence. It has made almost no progress in fulfilling its primary mission.\u0026rdquo; While Kerr compares trade negotiations to a ship, others have compared them to riding a bicycle: \u0026ldquo;the \u0026lsquo;bicycle theory,\u0026rsquo; of course, is simply that like a bicycle, the world trading system must always go forward. For if it ever stops going forward, it will surely fall and fail.\u0026rdquo; (Bacchus, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e, p. 429) The first 50 years after World War II illustrated the successful bike riding, with regionalism and multilateralism progressing together (Baldwin, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). The last thirty years, however, have shown the stalling, falling, and failing. Baldwin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e, p. 95) notes that the WTO is perceived to be \u0026ldquo;suffering from a deep malaise,\u0026rdquo; and he describes the Doha Round of WTO negotiations as having \u0026ldquo;staggered between failures, flops, and false dawns since it was launched in 2001.\u0026rdquo; Elliott (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e) characterizes the Doha Round as being in a \u0026ldquo;zombie-like state \u0026ndash; not alive but also not dead and fully buried.\u0026rdquo; The tariffs that President Trump announced in April 2025 might one day be considered the death warrant of the WTO. Those tariffs violated the core nondiscrimination principle of the WTO while also being inconsistent with nearly every trade agreement the world\u0026rsquo;s largest country has signed under its auspices. Indeed, Froman (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR18\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e) declares that \u0026ldquo;the World Trade Organization has effectively ceased to function, as it fails to negotiate, monitor, or enforce member commitments.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe decline of multilateralism since the mid-1990s has been occurring at the same time that countries have negotiated increasing numbers of preferential trade agreements. The earliest preferential agreements tended to be signed between regional trading partners, so this trend has become known as regionalism. This paper will refer to these preferential deals as regional trade agreements (RTAs) even though many of the recent agreements are between countries, such as the United States and South Korea, that are on opposite sides of the globe.\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e shows the rise of regional trade agreements in the world trading system. Beginning with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, there was a first wave of regionalism in which intra-RTA trade rose from essentially nothing to 33% of world trade by 1973. After stalling for over a decade, regionalism surged again beginning in the mid-1980s and has continued apace ever since. In the most recent data, nearly 60% of world trade occurs within some form of preferential trade agreement. In the data set used in this paper, the average country went from having a little over 9 RTA partners in 1995 to over 33 preferential partners in 2024. The surge in regionalism extended to include nearly every country around the world. By 2011, every WTO member except Mongolia belonged to at least one regional trade agreement (WTO, 2011).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eScholars have long worried that regional agreements would undermine the multilateral trade talks. That fear emerged nearly as soon as countries began negotiating regional agreements in the aftermath of World War II. Dam (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1963\u003c/span\u003e) notes that the regional agreements being signed in the 1950s and early 1960s, \u0026ldquo;far from being halfway houses on the road to non-discriminatory and freer trade, may be in direct conflict with those goals.\u0026rdquo; Metaphors abound in describing the impact of regionalism on multilateralism. In a memorable phrase, Bhagwati (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1992\u003c/span\u003e) asked the question: \u0026ldquo;Is regionalism truly a building, rather than a stumbling, bloc towards multilateral free trade for all?\u0026rdquo; Winters (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e) asks whether regionalism is a \u0026ldquo;friend or foe\u0026rdquo; of the multilateral system. Schiff and Winters (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2005\u003c/span\u003e) suggest that regional agreements can either be stepping stones to global free trade or millstones around the neck of multilateralism. Whatever metaphor one uses, it is now more than 60 years after Dam (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1963\u003c/span\u003e) raised the question of how regionalism would affect the multilateral process, and we still do not have a definitive answer.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSource: Author\u0026rsquo;s calculation based on IMF Direction of Trade Statistics trade data and WTO data on preferential agreements\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHas regionalism contributed to the difficulties the WTO has faced? Despite the numerous theoretical papers evaluating how regionalism might affect multilateralism, relatively few empirical studies have been done because of the difficulty of measuring how committed each country is to the multilateral process. Probably the most convincing empirical studies on this topic such as Limao (2006) use reductions in a country\u0026rsquo;s MFN tariff levels as a proxy for its commitment to multilateralism. This paper uses a different, and more direct, measure of how countries cooperate with the WTO by observing the thousands of country actions related to the WTO every year as they participate in trade negotiations, make positive or negative statements about trade talks, reject or accept trade proposals, etc. These actions are captured in an events data set that records news reports of country behaviors and statements related to the WTO. In doing so, it allows one of the first direct tests of how regionalism affects countries\u0026rsquo; commitment to the WTO process. The goal of the paper is to contribute toward our understanding of how regionalism affects multilateralism and whether the growth of preferential trade agreements contributed to the decline of the WTO.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"2. Theory on how regionalism affects multilateralism","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec3\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003e2.1 Harmful effects of regionalism\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eBhagwati (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1992\u003c/span\u003e, p. 554), after laying out the basic question of whether regional agreements are \u0026ldquo;building blocs\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;stumbling blocs\u0026rdquo; on the path to free trade, comes down firmly on the side of the latter, concluding that \u0026ldquo;the revival of regionalism is unfortunate.\u0026rdquo; Later, Bhagwati (2008) describes regional agreements as \u0026ldquo;termites in the trading system\u0026rdquo; and describes some political reasons they harm multilateralism. One is that the possibility of regional agreements diverts exporters\u0026rsquo; lobbying efforts away from supporting multilateral liberalization toward supporting regional agreements. Second, there are limited numbers of skilled bureaucratic trade negotiators and RTA talks divert their time and energy away from WTO rounds. Third, politicians have a limited amount of political capital that they can spend on pushing trade deals across the line. RTAs allow them to claim success in striking (less important) regional trade deals so they have less incentive to focus their political capital on concluding the more important multilateral rounds.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Levy (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1997\u003c/span\u003e), citizens vote on trade policy. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem shows that in a capital-abundant country, citizens with low capital-labor ratios may be harmed by trade due to adverse price changes. Suppose that the median voter is such a citizen. The median voter may still be willing to vote for multilateral free trade if the gains from an increased variety of goods outweigh losses from adverse price movements. Consider, however, the case in which the country has the option of signing a regional trade agreement with a partner country that has a similar capital-labor ratio. This would allow the median voter in each country to get some of the gains from increased variety without suffering the losses from Stolper-Samuelson effects. The median voter could thus prefer the regional trade deal to the multilateral one even though multilateral free trade generates larger total gains for the country as a whole.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKrishna (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1998\u003c/span\u003e) presents a theoretical model of how regional trade agreements can hinder multilateral liberalization. Regional agreements are signed if they receive enough political support from both countries. Consumers benefit from regional agreements but producers may oppose them if the agreement leads to an increase in imports that replaces domestic production (i.e. if there is trade creation). Trade diversion, however, means that increased imports replace trade from countries outside the preferential bloc and thus it does not create any domestic losers. The implication is that countries are more likely to sign regional trade agreements that are trade-diverting because those agreements generate less political resistance. Trade-diverting regional agreements, however, reduce the political feasibility of multilateral liberalization. Such regional agreements create rents within the bloc that are lost if a multilateral trade deal lowering tariffs is agreed to.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlbertin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2008\u003c/span\u003e) presents a model in which firms receive greater profits if their country signs a regional trade agreement than if it chooses a global free trade option. An organized lobby of firms give campaign contributions to the policymaker, who cares about both social welfare and contributions. Global free trade maximizes social welfare and would be the policymaker\u0026rsquo;s choice in the absence of lobbying. If the policymaker cares enough about campaign money, however, the organized interest group can offer contributions to get the policy maker to choose a regional trade agreement instead of multilateral free trade.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn McLaren (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR29\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2002\u003c/span\u003e), regionalism leads to investments that are sunk costs in the production of certain goods. A regional trade agreement causes a country become more specialized toward its regional trade bloc partners but less specialized toward the rest of the world. This reduces the demand for multilateral free trade. The anticipation of regionalism leads countries to invest in ways that lead to increased demand for regionalism. When there are sunk costs of investment and frictions in trade negotiations, it is common for models to have two equilibrium outcomes: one with multilateral free trade and the other with a regional trade agreement. If people expect global free trade to be reached, they will invest in the area that their country has a comparative advantage in. Every country becomes highly specialized and the ex post gains from multilateral trade liberalization are large. If people expect to have an RTA, they anticipate that goods produced by countries outside the bloc will be expensive so they invest in sectors that nonbloc countries have a comparative advantage in. They also make sunk cost investments in sectors that will be profitable under an RTA. In that case, the ex post gains from multilateral liberalization are smaller relative to the gains from the RTA. If there are higher transaction costs to negotiating a multilateral agreement, the possibility of the RTA could lead to investments that mean it is eventually preferred to global trade liberalization.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLimao (2006) outlines a model in which a large country offers a tariff preference to an RTA partner country in exchange for cooperation on nontrade issues. If the country reduces its MFN tariff to zero, it is unable to offer this tariff preference. The potential for countries to offer tariff preferences in regional agreements thus gives countries an incentive to keep their MFN tariffs higher than they would otherwise choose to do.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWinters (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR38\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e) argues that regionalism \u0026ldquo;has been systemically harmful\u0026rdquo; to multilateralism. One main reason is that the WTO has found it difficult to deal with policy areas such as non-trade barriers, investment, and intellectual property that have become increasingly important trade considerations as tariff levels have fallen. As a result, countries have turned away from multilateral negotiations to regional agreements to address concerns over those policies. Countries have also sought to form mega-regionals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the goal of forming a large enough coalition to be able to dictate terms to other countries rather than engaging in the multilateral process.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLewis (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) calls into question the relevance of the World Trade Organization today. She argues that regionalism has had a mixed impact on the WTO over the years. During times when the multilateral system has been flexible enough to accommodate countries\u0026rsquo; goals, regional agreements \u0026ldquo;have not detracted, and may have helped, further the multilateral endeavours.\u0026rdquo; (Lewis, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e, p. 111) Countries have turned to regionalism, however, during times when the multilateral forums have stalled, as they are at present.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec4\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003e2.2 Beneficial effects of regionalism\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eBaldwin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1993\u003c/span\u003e) presents a \u0026ldquo;domino\u0026rdquo; theory of regionalism. When a set of countries signs a regional trade agreement, it harms the firms outside the trading bloc who had been exporting to the RTA countries. Those exporters have a profit motive to push their governments to join the RTA, and some new countries join. This expansion of the RTA creates more political pressure on other countries to join, which leads to further enlargement. Free trade within regional trading blocs could spread rapidly under this process. Bergstrand, Egger, and Larch (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e) find some evidence supporting this argument. They show that new regional trade agreements are more likely to be signed (or existing ones enlarged) during periods of time when there is a greater level of regionalism in the rest of the world. Thus, regionalism can generate its own momentum.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBaldwin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e) describes a world in which regionalism and multilateralism can work together. Both strengthen exporting sectors while weakening import-competing industries, which shifts political power toward groups in favor of further trade liberalization. Regional trade agreements may also encourage countries outside of regional trading blocs to push for broad tariff reductions. Baldwin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e) suggests that European integration encouraged the US and Japan to seek multilateral tariff cuts so their firms would not be at such a large disadvantage in trying to sell their goods into Europe. Elliott (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e) also discusses the contention that European integration spurred the United States to support multilateral negotiations. Likewise, Bergsten (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1996\u003c/span\u003e) argued that the NAFTA negotiations demonstrated that the US had alternative trade options, which put pressure on holdouts in the Uruguay Round and helped bring it to a conclusion.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAghion et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2007\u003c/span\u003e) present a model of bargaining in which a country decides whether to negotiate simultaneously with all of the other countries in the world at once or to negotiate free trade agreements with subsets of countries. The model shows that regionalism can act as either a stumbling block or building block toward free trade. Under certain circumstances, global free trade is attainable only if regional trade agreements are allowed. In other cases, however, global free trade can be achieved only if regionalism is prohibited.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePomfret (2021) argues that modern regional agreements do not weaken the WTO. Instead, they are attempts to solve the problem that the WTO framework is unable to progress toward deep agreements because it requires consensus. Modern regional agreements are aimed at facilitating trade and often include measures, such as simplified customs procedures, that are non-discriminatory. Because MFN tariffs have been reduced to such low levels in recent decades, the tariff preferences given in regional trade deals often have little effect. With a bureaucratic cost of qualifying for tariff preferences due to rules of origin, exporters often find it is cheaper to pay the low MFN tariff than to seek the tariff preference. Thus, the impacts of modern regional agreements do not come about because of bilateral tariff reductions, and they are not a threat to multilateral tariff negotiations.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOrnelas (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR31\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2005\u003c/span\u003e) suggests that regional trade agreements cause participating countries to lower their external tariffs. Ornelas presents a model of an oligopolistic industry that lobbies the government for tariff protection. Tariffs lead to a higher market share for the domestic firms in the oligopoly. A regional trade agreement means that some of the higher market share from external tariffs goes to RTA partner country firms. This reduces the gain to domestic firms of high external tariffs and reduces the incentive of the government to raise tariffs as well as reducing the political contributions that firms are willing to give for high external tariffs. Thus, external tariffs fall with an RTA. In the model, a regional trade agreement lowers campaign contributions so it is only feasible politically if it raises welfare. Welfare consideration become more important in determining trade policy so it is less likely that campaign contributions would be used by firms to block a multilateral trade deal that is welfare enhancing. Overall, then, regional trade agreements enhance support for multilateralism by reducing the role of special interests in government\u0026rsquo;s trade decisions.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec5\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003e2.3 Empirical results on how regionalism affects multilateralism\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe few empirical studies that have been done on this topic usually examine how a country\u0026rsquo;s most-favored nation (MFN) tariffs change in response to its participation in regional trade agreements. Limao (2006) was, to my knowledge, the first paper to estimate the effect of regionalism on multilateralism empirically. He did so by comparing US tariff reductions in the Uruguay Round on goods that the United States imported from RTA countries to tariff reductions on goods that it imported from non-RTA countries. The US reduced its multilateral tariffs less for goods that imported from RTA trading partners than it did for other goods. This result suggests that regionalism acted as a stumbling bloc to multilateral liberalization for the United States. It supports the prediction from his model that countries have incentives to maintain higher MFN tariffs on goods that they import from RTA partners.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCalvo-Pardo et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2009\u003c/span\u003e), on the other hand, find that preferential trade reductions by ASEAN countries led them to reduce their MFN tariffs. They argue that this effect is a causal one and thus, ASEAN contributed to broader trade liberalization. Similarly, Estevadeordal et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2008\u003c/span\u003e) find that Latin American countries reduced their MFN tariffs in a sector more if they had granted preferential tariff reductions in that sector through regional trade agreements. They conclude that the fears of a stumbling bloc effect of regionalism are unfounded. Foroutan (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1998\u003c/span\u003e) also shows that the Latin American countries that were in effective regional trade agreements had lower average tariff rates and reduced their tariffs more than did other Latin American countries. She argues, however, that the causality does not run from RTAs leading to open trade regimes but rather that an open trade regime is necessary for the development of a meaningful RTA.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLibman (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR25\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) looks at how the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union affected its countries\u0026rsquo; interactions with the WTO. He finds that the regional agreement did not reduce countries\u0026rsquo; interest in becoming WTO members or constrain them in their WTO negotiations.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAzmeh (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) notes that the building bloc logic is that outsiders demand more multilateral liberalization to reduce negative effects of RTA tariff preferences imposed on them by other countries\u0026rsquo; regional trade agreements. The stumbling bloc logic is that the insiders get gains from regional agreements that make them less eager to participate in multilateral liberalization. The empirical papers described above, as well as this paper, are looking at the effects of regionalism on the participant countries (i.e., the insider countries). An alternative might examine the MFN tariffs or cooperation with the WTO by countries that are excluded from regional agreements. Theoretically, the latter group of outsiders should show an increased cooperation in multilateral trade deals negotiated through the WTO. Azmeh (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) finds in interviews with 60 different WTO member states, however, that insider countries who entered into regional agreements with the US, EU, and China were highly supportive of efforts to break the gridlock in the WTO.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"3. Data and Empirical Method","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis paper measures a country\u0026rsquo;s level of cooperation with the WTO using the GDELT events dataset, which uses machine reading of news sources to identify the actors and actions in each story. In recent years, the GDELT dataset reads in well over 100,000 events each day which means that approximately 50\u0026nbsp;million events are recorded over the course of a year. Each event is classified using the CAMEO coding system and Goldstein (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1992\u003c/span\u003e) provides a score measuring how cooperative or conflictual the action in each event code is. The Goldstein score was based on the average ratings of net cooperation for each event type from a panel of eight international relations scholars, where the scale ranged from extreme conflict (-10) to extreme cooperation (10). A common way of measuring cooperation between entities is to sum the values of the Goldstein scores for each event between the two parties. Reuveny and Kang (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR32\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1998\u003c/span\u003e), for instance, use the sum of Goldstein scores across all events involving two particular countries to measure cooperation between the country pair. The overall level of cooperation is thus a weighted average of each interaction, where the weights indicate how conflictual or cooperative the interaction is.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSince 1995, there have been over 38,000 events in the GDELT data set in which the source was a country and the target actor was the World Trade Organization. The events used to measure each country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO are listed in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e. The most common event involving the WTO was when a country engaged in negotiations, which occurred in the data set over 4,000 different times. Negotiations were part of the broader category of consulting, and countries consulted with the WTO over 10,000 times in the dataset. Other common cooperative actions included expressing an intent to cooperate with the WTO, which happened over 5,000 times, and making an appeal, which happened over 4,400 times. Conflictual actions included making demands of the WTO, issuing official complaints or threats toward it, expressing disapproval, and halting negotiations.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis paper sums the Goldstein scores for all the events listed in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e over the course of the year where the WTO was the target actor to measure each country\u0026rsquo;s yearly cooperation with the WTO. Negative values for the variable indicate that the country\u0026rsquo;s interactions with the WTO tend to be conflictual in that year while positive values indicate a more cooperative relationship.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEach country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO depends on many factors. The one this paper focuses on is how much the country has participated in signing regional trade agreements. One way to measure a country\u0026rsquo;s emphasis on regionalism is to count the number of partners with whom the country has a preferential trade agreement at the start of the year. In a regression of the country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO on the number of its RTA partners, the coefficient on the latter variable is a measure of how each new preferential trading partner affects the country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO. Another possible measure of regionalism is the fraction of a country\u0026rsquo;s trade in the previous year that occurs within a preferential trading bloc. A positive coefficient on these variables would suggest that a larger share of intra-RTA trade as a fraction of total trade promotes countries\u0026rsquo; participation in the multilateral trade negotiations while a negative coefficient would indicate that regionalism hinders multilateralism. The coefficient estimate on the regionalism variable thus provides a preliminary answer about whether regionalism is a friend or a foe of multilateralism, a building bloc or a stumbling bloc toward free trade, and a stepping stone toward free trade or a millstone around the neck of multilateralism.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOther factors that could affect a country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO are controlled for in the model. Interactions with the WTO may change over time for all countries based on worldwide conditions and trends, so the models include a fixed effect for each year to control for time-specific factors. The size of the country and their income level may also matter, so the regressions include the log of GDP and the log of GDP per capita in the previous year. Some countries in the data set are members of the WTO while other countries are not, so the control variables include a dummy variable for WTO membership at the start of the year. The regressions also control for two aspects of the country\u0026rsquo;s government coming from the V-Dem data project (Coppedge et al., 2024). One is an index ranging from zero to one measuring how democratic the country is during the year based on freedom of association, clean elections, freedom of expression, elected officials, and suffrage. The other variable measures the ideology of the government as indicated by the fraction of the data project\u0026rsquo;s coders who characterize the ideology of the country\u0026rsquo;s chief executive as socialist or communist.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere may also be unobserved factors specific to each country that affect how cooperative or conflictual their interactions with the WTO are. If these factors remain constant over time, we can control for them by including a fixed effect for each country in the regressions. Thus, some of the models in this paper include country fixed effects.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHeteroskedasticity is a concern in this application. Activities of larger (and richer) countries are reported more closely in the media and thus there are likely to be many more observations in the events data set detailing interactions between large countries and the WTO. There are more cooperative events than conflictual ones in the events data set, so this could push the cooperation measure upward for larger and richer countries. The regressions include both log GDP and log GDP per capita to control for the effect of this potential overreporting of larger countries on the dependent variable. But overreporting will also mean that there is wider variation of cooperation with the WTO among large countries than among small ones, who have relatively few events and whose cooperation scores tend to be closer to zero on average. In the data, tests of heteroskedasticity proposed by Breusch and Pagan (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1979\u003c/span\u003e) strongly reject the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity. The standard errors calculated for the coefficient estimates are thus adjusted to account for heteroskedasticity. Long and Ervin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2000\u003c/span\u003e) discuss the properties of different estimators of the standard errors.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnother potential econometric concern is measurement error. In this situation, we do not observe the true level of cooperation between a country and the WTO. Instead, we have an estimate of cooperation based on news reports about the country\u0026rsquo;s actions. Millimet and Parmeter (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) note that classic random measurement error in the dependent variable does not create biased coefficient estimates in a linear model, though it does mean that the coefficients are estimated with less precision. They show, however, that measurement error in the dependent variable can lead to biased coefficient estimates if the measurement error is either one-sided or skewed with a non-zero mean. It is possible that measurement error skews the WTO cooperation variable in a positive direction if countries openly tout their cooperative behavior and participation in WTO negotiations but hide their obstruction of those negotiations. With skewed measurement error in the dependent variable, the estimate of the intercept will be biased and it is possible that estimates of the slope coefficients will be biased as well if the measurement error is heteroskedastic. Millimet and Parmeter (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e) recommend stochastic frontier analysis as a method of estimating coefficients in the presence of skewed measurement error in the dependent variable.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePerhaps the most important econometric issue the estimation needs to confront is endogeneity of the regionalism variable. Countries choose how much they participate in regionalism and multilateralism simultaneously, so those are not two separate decisions. Even though the regionalism variables are lagged by one year, that does not resolve the issue that the number of a country\u0026rsquo;s preferential trading partners is jointly determined with its participation in the multilateral process. This paper addresses endogeneity in the regionalism variable by estimating models using two-stage least squares, a form of instrumental variables (IV). The IV models require identification of instruments that affect the endogenous variable but have no direct impact on the dependent variable. In this case, that means we need variables affecting how many preferential trading partners the country has but not directly affecting its cooperation with the WTO. This paper uses two instruments. The first is based on the tendency of a country\u0026rsquo;s major trading partners to sign regional trade agreements. For each country, the ten largest trading partners were identified. The instrument is the average number of preferential trade agreements (other than with the country itself) that these ten largest trading partners had at the start of the previous year. A large number for this instrument means that the country\u0026rsquo;s major trading partners tended to sign many preferential agreements, which would mean the country has ample opportunity to engage in regionalism if it chooses. This instrument is strongly correlated with the number of the country\u0026rsquo;s own preferential trading partners but should not theoretically (and does not empirically) affect the country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the second instrument, I estimate a gravity model using a dataset of the world\u0026rsquo;s dyads predicting the probability that two countries will have a regional trade agreement in a given year. The instrument is the sum of the predicted probabilities of an RTA over all the other countries in the data set. There are a number of papers that have developed models of RTA formation, including Magee (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e), Baier and Bergstrand (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2004\u003c/span\u003e), and Baldwin and Jaimovich (2012). These papers show that a pair of countries is more likely to have a regional trade agreement if they are large economies, near each other geographically, share a common border, speak the same language, are remote from other countries in the world, share similar political systems, and have a similar economic size. This paper\u0026rsquo;s model of RTA formation includes these variables, a dummy variable for a shared colonial history, and an alliance indicator variable described in Leeds et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2002\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTable\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e presents estimates of a probit model of RTA formation. Though not shown, the regression also includes dummy variables for each year. As the estimates show, a pair of countries is significantly more likely to have a regional trade agreement if they are near each other geographically, speak the same language, share a common colonial history, have a military alliance with each other, have large and rich economies that are similar in size and income, are both democracies, and are remote from other countries with large economies. These results are intuitive and are consistent with previous research on RTA formation. The explanatory variables do well in predicting which countries are likely to have regional trade agreements as shown by the pseudo-R\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e of 0.43.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe next section discusses several different tests of instrument validity when presenting the results of the instrumental variable estimation.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"4. Results","content":"\u003cp\u003eTable\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e presents the results of estimating the empirical model. Following Millimet and Parmeter (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e), the coefficients are estimated using stochastic frontier analysis. The first two columns use the number of regional trading partners a country has to measure its emphasis on regionalism. The last two columns measure regionalism as the percentage of the country\u0026rsquo;s total trade that comes from RTA partner countries. Columns 2 and 4 in the table include fixed effects for each country to control for the effects of unmeasured country characteristics that are constant over time.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs the table shows, the coefficients on the regionalism variables are negative and statistically significant at the 5% level or better in all four of the regressions. In column 1, each extra RTA partner country reduces the country\u0026rsquo;s measured cooperation with the WTO by 0.27. The coefficient is statistically significant at the 1% level, but is the effect a meaningful one? A decline of 0.27 would be a 2.6% fall from the average level of cooperation. In terms of standardized coefficients, a rise of one standard deviation in the number of RTA partners reduces a country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO by 0.12 standard deviations. The estimated effect, while not negligible, is relatively moderate in size.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf country fixed effects are included, as in column 2, the coefficient on the RTA partner variable remains statistically significant and negative but the coefficient on the number of RTA partners falls in magnitude to -0.14. Similar results emerge in columns 3 and 4 measuring regionalism using the share of the country\u0026rsquo;s trade that comes from other RTA partners. Without the country fixed effects, a one percentage point increase in the RTA share of a country\u0026rsquo;s trade reduces the country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO by 0.26 points. A one standard deviation rise in the RTA share of trade reduces cooperation with the WTO by 0.12 standard deviations. Thus, measuring regionalism by the RTA trade share and by the number of RTA partners give very similar results. Including country fixed effects reduces the impact of regionalism on WTO cooperation between models 3 and 4, though the effect remains statistically significant at the 1% level. In the fixed effects model, a one standard deviation increase in the RTA share of trade reduces cooperation with the WTO by 0.04 standard deviations.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne way to get a sense of the total impact of regionalism on countries\u0026rsquo; relationships with the WTO is to estimate how the WTO cooperation variable would have evolved over time had there been no increase in regional trade agreements. We can use the coefficient estimates in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e to answer this counterfactual. For these calculations, I use the model in column 1 to generate a predicted level of country cooperation with the WTO based on the actual values of the variables in each country. I then generate a counterfactual where all the other variables in the regression evolve over time as they did in reality but the number of RTA partners each country has remains fixed at its level at the start of the year 1995. Figure\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e shows the average predicted WTO cooperation levels across all countries for each year based on these calculations. The solid line shows the average country cooperation with the WTO given the upward trend in regionalism that actually occurred. As the figure shows, predicted cooperation with the WTO peaked in 2016 at an average value of approximately 26.6 and then fell to an average value of 4.6 by 2023. The dashed line in the figure shows the model\u0026rsquo;s prediction of what average cooperation with the WTO would have been had there been no new regional trade agreements signed after the WTO began in January 1995. Without the trend toward more regional agreements, cooperation with the WTO would have been considerably better. At its peak in 2016, cooperation would have been 24% better without the new RTAs signed since 1995. The model predicts that without the trend toward regionalism, the 2023 level of cooperation with the WTO would have been at an average value of 12.6, which is above the average value of cooperation in the dataset. With regionalism, however, cooperation with the WTO fell to a value in 2023 (4.6) that represents the worst cooperation with the WTO after its first year in existence.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe conclusions about the effects of the control variables depend on whether country fixed effects are included in the estimation. In the first column, the coefficients on log GDP and democracy suggests that larger countries are significantly more cooperative with the WTO than smaller countries are while democracies are significantly less cooperative with the WTO. Those two coefficient estimates become statistically insignificant, however, when country fixed effects are added to the model in column 2. The lack of significance may be due to relative stability in these two explanatory variables over time. The fixed effect estimation examines how changes in the explanatory variable over time are related to changes in their cooperation with the WTO. There tend to be only relatively small changes in a country\u0026rsquo;s level of democracy from year to year, for instance, so it is difficult to estimate how changes in democracy affect changes in the country\u0026rsquo;s WTO cooperation. Column 1 reveals a significant positive coefficient on the socialist government variable, but the coefficient drops close to zero when country fixed effects are added. This combination suggests that while countries that usually elect socialist governments tend to cooperate relatively well with the WTO, a change in the ideology of the government has no significant impact on its cooperation.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInterestingly, countries that are not members of the WTO yet are more cooperative toward the organization than countries that are already in it. The significant negative coefficient remains when country fixed effects are included, which suggests that even controlling for unobserved country characteristics, joining the WTO reduces the country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the organization. One explanation for this result is that the non-WTO countries may be hoping to be admitted into the organization so they withhold criticism of it until after they have been allowed in. China, for instance, was measured as being very cooperative toward the WTO in 1999, 2000, and 2001 as it negotiated its entry into the organization. Its cooperation then dropped to more normal (but still positive) levels of cooperation in the next few years. The result is not being driven by China, however. Even if China is omitted from the analysis, non-WTO countries cooperate more with the WTO than do those already in the organization.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTable\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e presents two-stage least squares analysis of the effects of regionalism on WTO cooperation, treating regionalism as endogenous. The table uses the number of regional trading partners as the measure of regionalism. There are two different variables used as instruments for regionalism. As described in the previous section, the two instruments are the average number of preferential trading partners that the country\u0026rsquo;s ten largest trading partners have and the predicted total number of RTA partners for the country from a gravity model of RTA formation. Models 1 and 4 include only the first instrument. Models 2 and 5 include only the second instrument. Models 3 and 6 include both instruments. Models 4, 5, and 6 include country fixed effects while Models 1, 2, and 3 do not.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne test of instrument validity considers the relevance of the instrument, which is normally evaluated by looking at the F-statistic for the instrument in the first stage regression. Staiger and Stock (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR36\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1997\u003c/span\u003e) suggest that an instrument should be considered weak if the F-statistic for the instrument in the first stage regression is below 10. Stock and Yogo (2005) provide critical values above which the null hypothesis of a weak instrument can be rejected. The critical values range up to a maximum value of 38 in the regressions in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e. The two instruments used in the two-stage least squares regressions are both very strongly correlated with the number of RTA partners a country has. In the regressions without country fixed effects, the F-statistics for the instruments are above 2,000 in all three regressions. In the models with country fixed effects, the F-statistics are all above 400. In all cases, these are far above the critical values in Stock and Yogo (2005) and they suggest that weak instruments are not a concern here. The Sargan statistic (Sargan, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR34\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1958\u003c/span\u003e) testing the overidentification restrictions on the instruments is not statistically significant, which means that the null hypothesis of valid instruments is not rejected.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe coefficient on the RTA partners variable is negative and statistically significant at the 10% level or better in all six IV regressions in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e. The coefficients on the regionalism variable remain very stable across the six regressions, ranging from \u0026minus;\u0026thinsp;0.35 to -0.55. The estimated negative effect of regionalism on cooperation with the WTO is larger in the IV regression than in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e, which treated regionalism as exogenous to multilateralism. In 2024, the average country had a value for cooperation with the WTO of 6.7. Using the average of the coefficients on the regionalism variable in Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e, countries would be predicted to have had an average cooperation with the WTO nearly three times higher (19.8) if there had been no trend upward in RTAs after 1995. That predicted value would have been higher than the actual cooperation values in all but two of the 30 years in the data set. Overall, then, the results provide strong evidence that regionalism hinders multilateralism.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"5. Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis paper has presented a test of how the spread of regionalism has affected countries\u0026rsquo; levels of cooperation with the WTO and participation in the process of multilateral trade negotiations. It introduces a novel use of an events dataset to measure each country\u0026rsquo;s cooperation with the WTO from news stories of countries\u0026rsquo; participation in WTO negotiations and statements about the WTO. The model estimates fall strongly on the side of scholars who have argued that regionalism is a foe to multilateralism. In all the regressions, which include both country fixed effects and treating RTA choices as endogenous, there is a statistically significant negative coefficient on the variable measuring a country\u0026rsquo;s participation in regionalism.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese results do not necessarily mean that regionalism has blocked the way to global free trade. Global free trade could potentially be reached by several different paths. One is to build on the rounds of multilateral negotiations that were concluded under the GATT. Another is to have each country successively sign more bilateral and plurilateral agreements until eventually each country has a free trade agreement with every other country in the world. This paper suggests that these are two separate paths and that moving down the path of regionalism makes it harder to progress along the multilateral path. It does not, however, necessarily mean that the regionalism path is a dead end.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the WTO, this may be scant consolation. The WTO has suffered a series of blows in recent decades as the Doha Round negotiations were mired in quicksand, the dispute settlement procedures fell apart with the United States blocking the appointment of new appellate court judges, and trade wars have broken out all over during the opening months of the second Trump administration. Perhaps these blows would all have fallen on the WTO even in the absence of regionalism. Nonetheless, this paper provides the first empirical evidence that regionalism turned the relationships between the WTO and countries more conflictual and less cooperative. Regionalism may not have killed the WTO, but it has certainly helped to put it on life support.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAghion, P., Antr\u0026agrave;s, P., \u0026amp; Helpman, E. (2007). Negotiating free trade. \u003cem\u003eJournal of International Economics\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e73\u003c/em\u003e(1), 1-30.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAlbertin, G. (2008). Regionalism or multilateralism? A political economy choice. \u003cem\u003eIMF Working Paper 08/65\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAzmeh, S. (2024). \u0026lsquo;Saving the WTO\u0026rsquo;: middle power insiders and joint statement initiatives at the World Trade Organisation. \u003cem\u003eNew Political Economy\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e29\u003c/em\u003e(1), 60-74. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBacchus, James. (2003). \u0026ldquo;The Bicycle Club: Affirming the American Interest in the Future of the WTO. \u003cem\u003eJournal of World Trade\u003c/em\u003e, 37(3), 429-441. https://doi.org/10.54648/trad2003023\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBaier, S. L., \u0026amp; Bergstrand, J. H. (2004). Economic determinants of free trade agreements. \u003cem\u003eJournal of international Economics\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e64\u003c/em\u003e(1), 29-63.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBaldwin, R. (1993). A domino theory of regionalism. \u003cem\u003eNBER Working Paper 4465\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBaldwin, R. (2016). The World Trade Organization and the future of multilateralism. \u003cem\u003eJournal of Economic Perspectives\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e30\u003c/em\u003e(1), 95-116. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBergsten, C. F. (1996). \u003cem\u003eCompetitive liberalization and global free trade: A vision for the 21st century\u003c/em\u003e. Institute for International Economics.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBergstrand, J. H., Egger, P., \u0026amp; Larch, M. (2016). Economic determinants of the timing of preferential trade agreement formations and enlargements. \u003cem\u003eEconomic Inquiry\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e54\u003c/em\u003e(1), 315-341.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBhagwati, J. (1992). Regionalism versus multilateralism. \u003cem\u003eWorld Economy\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e15\u003c/em\u003e(5), 535-556. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBreusch, T. S., and Pagan, A. R. (1979) A simple test for heteroscedasticity and random coefficient variation. \u003cem\u003eEconometrica\u003c/em\u003e 47, 1287-1294.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCalvo-Pardo, H., Freund, C., \u0026amp; Ornelas, E. (2009). The ASEAN free trade agreement: impact on trade flows and external trade barriers.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCoppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Cecilia Borella, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerl\u0026oslash;w, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Ryd\u0026eacute;n, Johannes von R\u0026ouml;mer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundstr\u0026ouml;m, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2024. \u0026quot;V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v14\u0026quot; Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/mcwt-fr58. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eDam, K. W. (1963). Regional economic arrangements and the GATT: the legacy of a misconception. \u003cem\u003eThe University of Chicago Law Review\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e30\u003c/em\u003e(4), 615-665. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eElliott, K. A. (2018). The WTO and regional/bilateral trade agreements. In \u003cem\u003eHandbook of International Trade Agreements\u003c/em\u003e (pp. 17-28). Routledge. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eEstevadeordal, A., Freund, C., \u0026amp; Ornelas, E. (2008). Does regionalism affect trade liberalization toward nonmembers?. \u003cem\u003eThe Quarterly Journal of Economics\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e123\u003c/em\u003e(4), 1531-1575.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eForoutan, F. (1998). \u003cem\u003eDoes membership in a regional preferential trade arrangement make a country more or less protectionist?\u003c/em\u003e (Vol. 1898). World Bank Publications.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eFroman, M. (2025). After the Trade War: Remaking Rules from the Ruins of the Rules-Based System. \u003cem\u003eForeign Affairs \u003c/em\u003e104(5). \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eGoldstein, J. S. (1992). A conflict-cooperation scale for WEIS events data. \u003cem\u003eJournal of Conflict Resolution\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e36\u003c/em\u003e(2), 369-385.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eKerr, W. A. (2023). Becalmed: The World Trade Organization at Not Yet Thirty. \u003cem\u003eEstey Journal of International Law and Trade Policy\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e24\u003c/em\u003e(2), 50-62.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eKrishna, P. (1998). Regionalism and multilateralism: A political economy approach. \u003cem\u003eThe Quarterly Journal \u003c/em\u003e\u003cem\u003eof Economics\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e113\u003c/em\u003e(1), 227-251.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLeeds, B., Ritter, J., Mitchell, S., \u0026amp; Long, A. (2002). Alliance treaty obligations and provisions, 1815-1944. \u003cem\u003eInternational Interactions\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e28\u003c/em\u003e(3), 237-260.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLevy, P. I. (1997). A political-economic analysis of free-trade agreements. \u003cem\u003eThe American Economic Review\u003c/em\u003e, 506-519.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLewis, M. K. (2023). International Trade Agreements: Laboratories of Innovation or Propellers of Fragmentation?. \u003cem\u003eJournal of International Economic Law\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e1\u003c/em\u003e, 110-123. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLibman, A. (2024). Eurasian regionalism and the WTO: a building block or a stumbling stone? In A. Libman and A. Obydenkova, eds., \u003cem\u003eGlobal Governance and Interaction between International Institutions\u003c/em\u003e (Routledge: New York), pp. 100-118.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLim\u0026atilde;o, N. (2006). Preferential trade agreements as stumbling blocks for multilateral trade liberalization: Evidence for the United States. \u003cem\u003eAmerican Economic Review\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e96\u003c/em\u003e(3), 896-914.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eLong, J. S., \u0026amp; Ervin, L. H. (2000). Using heteroscedasticity consistent standard errors in the linear regression model. \u003cem\u003eThe American Statistician\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e54\u003c/em\u003e(3), 217-224. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMagee, C., 2003, \u0026ldquo;Endogenous Preferential Trade Agreements: An Empirical Analysis,\u0026rdquo; \u003cem\u003eContributions to Economic Analysis \u0026amp; Policy\u003c/em\u003e 2 (1), article 15, http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/contributions/vol2/iss1/art15.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMcLaren, J. (2002). A theory of insidious regionalism. \u003cem\u003eThe Quarterly Journal of Economics\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e117\u003c/em\u003e(2), 571-608.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eMillimet, D. L., \u0026amp; Parmeter, C. F. (2022). Accounting for skewed or one-sided measurement error in the dependent variable. \u003cem\u003ePolitical Analysis\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e30\u003c/em\u003e(1), 66-88.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eOrnelas, E. (2005). Endogenous free trade agreements and the multilateral trading system. \u003cem\u003eJournal of international Economics\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e67\u003c/em\u003e(2), 471-497.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eReuveny, R., and H. Kang, 1998, Bilateral Trade and Political Conflict/Cooperation: Do Goods Matter? \u003cem\u003eJournal of Peace Research\u003c/em\u003e, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 581-602.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eRomanchyshyna, I. (2023). Regionalism and Multilateralism: The WTO Perspective. \u003cem\u003eTechnical Barriers to Trade in \u0026ldquo;New Generation\u0026rdquo; RTAs and in the WTO Agreements: Conflict or Complementarity?\u003c/em\u003e, 47-105.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSargan, J. D. (1958). The estimation of economic relationships using instrumental variables. \u003cem\u003eEconometrica: Journal of the econometric society\u003c/em\u003e, 393-415.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSchiff, M. W., \u0026amp; Winters, L. A. (2005). Regional Trading Arrangements and Developing Countries. In \u003cem\u003eThe World Trade Organization: Legal, Economic and Political Analysis\u003c/em\u003e (pp. 1919-1932). Boston, MA: Springer US.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eStaiger, D., and J. H. Stock (1997). Instrumental variables regression with weak instruments. \u003cem\u003eEconometrica\u003c/em\u003e 65, 557\u0026ndash;86. \u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWinters, L. (2011). Preferential trading agreements: friend or foe. \u003cem\u003ePreferential Trade Agreements: A Law and Economics Analysis\u003c/em\u003e, 7.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eWinters, L. (2015). The WTO and regional trading agreements: is it all over for multilateralism? \u003cem\u003eEuropean University Institute Working Paper\u003c/em\u003e RSCAS 2015/94.\u003cem\u003e \u003c/em\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e"},{"header":"Footnotes","content":"\u003col start =\"2\"\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003e The WTO (2011) World Trade Report notes that about half of the preferential trade agreements in force are not strictly \u0026ldquo;regional\u0026rdquo; since they include countries from different regions of the world.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e"},{"header":"Tables","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab1\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 1\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvents directed at the World Trade Organization\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"4\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"char\" char=\".\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvent Code\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e# of events\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eGoldstein Scale\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e01\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e4157\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eMake a public statement\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e010\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2109\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emake a statement\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e012\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e769\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emake a pessimistic comment\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e013\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e617\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emake on optimistic comment\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e014\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e363\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003econsider policy option\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e015\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e34\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eacknowledge or claim responsibility\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e016\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e23\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003edeny responsibility\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e017\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e192\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eengage in symbolic act\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e018\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e30\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emake an empathetic comment\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e019\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e20\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress accord\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e02\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e4449\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eAppeal\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e020\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3666\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emake an appeal or request\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e021\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e102\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal for material cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0211\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal for economic cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0213\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e78\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal for judicial cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e022\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e134\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal for diplomatic cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e023\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e28\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal for aid\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e025\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e68\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal to yield\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e026\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e303\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal to others to meet or negotiate\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e027\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e22\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal to others to settle dispute\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e028\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e47\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eappeal to engage in or accept mediation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e03\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e5088\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eExpress intent to cooperate\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e030\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2296\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to cooperate\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e031\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e12\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to engage in material cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5.2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0311\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e174\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to cooperate economically\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5.2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e032\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e207\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to engage in diplomatic cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4.5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e33\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e43\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to provide material aid\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5.2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e331\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e23\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to provide economic aid\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5.2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e34\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e19\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to institute political reform\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e35\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e70\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to yield\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e36\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2131\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to meet or negotiate\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e37\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e92\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to settle dispute\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e38\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to accept mediation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e39\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e20\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eexpress intent to mediate\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab2\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 2\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eA Gravity model of the bilateral determinants of RTA formation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"4\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"char\" char=\".\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e04\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e10255\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eConsult\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e40\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3231\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003econsult\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e41\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e17\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ediscuss by telephone\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e42\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1393\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emake a visit (travel to a location for a meeting)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1.9\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e43\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1407\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ehost a visit\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2.8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e44\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e161\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emeet at a \"third\" location\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2.5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e45\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e31\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003emediate\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e46\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4015\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eengage in negotiations\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e05\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e3878\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eEngage in diplomatic cooperation\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e50\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e643\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eengage in diplomatic cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e51\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2434\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003epraise or endorse\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e52\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e26\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003edefend verbally\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e53\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e15\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003erally support on behalf of\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e54\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e24\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003egrant diplomatic recognition\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e6\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e57\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e736\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003esign a formal agreement\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e06\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e932\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eEngage in material cooperation\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e60\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e183\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eengage in material cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e6\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e61\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e749\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ecooperate economically\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e6.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e07\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e104\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eProvide aid\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e70\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e104\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eprovide aid\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e08\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e297\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eYield\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e80\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e218\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eyield\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e831\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e65\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eaccede to demands for change in leadership\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e833\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e14\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eaccede to demands for rights\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e09\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e220\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eInvestigate\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e90\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e220\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003einvestigate\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e10\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e584\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eDemand\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e100\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e526\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003edemand\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e106\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e43\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003edemand meeting, negotiation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2.6\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1043\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e15\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003edemand rights\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e11\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e5413\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003edisapprove\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e110\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e702\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003edisapprove\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e111\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e528\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ecriticize or denounce\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e112\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e450\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eaccuse\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e113\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e34\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003erally opposition against\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e114\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3406\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ecomplain officially\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e115\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e293\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ebring lawsuit against\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e12\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e1136\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eReject\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e120\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e746\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ereject\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e121\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ereject material cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1211\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ereject economic cooperation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e124\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e6\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003erefuse to yield\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e125\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e73\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ereject proposal to meet, discuss, negotiate\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e127\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e43\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ereject plan, agreement to settle dispute\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e128\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e233\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003edefy norms, law\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e129\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e31\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eveto\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e13\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e931\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eThreaten\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e130\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e524\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ethreaten\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-4.4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e131\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e142\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ethreaten (non-force)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5.8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1313\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e239\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ethreaten to reduce or break relations\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5.8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e133\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e9\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ethreaten with political dissent, protest\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5.8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e134\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e6\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ethreaten to halt negotiations\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-5.8\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e139\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e11\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003egive ultimatum\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e14\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e494\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eProtest\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e140\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e35\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eengage in political dissent\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-6.5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e141\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e459\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003edemonstrate or rally\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-6.5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e16\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003e298\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan type=\"Underline\" class=\"Underline\" name=\"Emphasis\"\u003eReduce relations\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e160\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e84\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ereduce relations\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e164\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e210\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ehalt negotiations\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-7\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e165\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"char\" char=\".\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ehalt mediation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-6.5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"No\" id=\"Taba\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"3\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eVariable\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c3\" namest=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eCoefficient\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLog distance\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.732\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eContiguous\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.120\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSpeak a common language\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.294\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eShare a colonial history\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.327\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlliance\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.390\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSum of log GDP\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.038\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSum of log GDP per capita\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.154\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eDifference in log GDP\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.044\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eDifference in log GDP per capita\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.073\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eRemote\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.179\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eDifference in democracy levels\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.567\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSum of democracy levels\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.907\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eObservations\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e409,410\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ePseudo- R\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.43\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe dependent variable equals one if the pair of countries has a regional trade agreement in year t\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe regression includes year fixed effects\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e*, **, *** indicate that the coefficient is statistically significant at the 10%, 5%, 1% levels, respectively\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStandard errors are clustered on each country pair\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab3\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 3\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eDeterminants of multilateral participation\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"9\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c5\" colnum=\"5\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c6\" colnum=\"6\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c7\" colnum=\"7\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c8\" colnum=\"8\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c9\" colnum=\"9\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eVariable\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c3\" namest=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c5\" namest=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c7\" namest=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c9\" namest=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eRTA partners\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.27\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.14\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eRTA trade share\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-25.76\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-9.38\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLog GDP per capita\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.06\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e21.49\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.46\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e17.54\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLog GDP\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e11.27\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-1.65\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e11.60\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3.79\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eWTO\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-11.22\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-19.62\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-10.91\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-18.99\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eDemocracy\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-24.52\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-6.23\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-26.10\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-4.55\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSocialist\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e39.39\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.92\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e40.24\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1.49\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eObservations\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,796\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,796\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,771\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,771\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eCountry fixed effects\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eYes\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eYes\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe models are estimated using stochastic frontier analysis\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll the regressions include year fixed effects\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e*, **, *** indicate that the coefficient is statistically significant at the 10%, 5%, 1% levels, respectively\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSignificance levels are based on standard errors that are robust to the presence of heteroskedasticity\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab4\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 4\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eDeterminants of multilateral participation, Two-stage least squares\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"13\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c5\" colnum=\"5\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c6\" colnum=\"6\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c7\" colnum=\"7\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c8\" colnum=\"8\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c9\" colnum=\"9\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c10\" colnum=\"10\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c11\" colnum=\"11\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c12\" colnum=\"12\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c13\" colnum=\"13\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eVariable\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c3\" namest=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 1\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c5\" namest=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 2\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c7\" namest=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 3\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c9\" namest=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 4\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c11\" namest=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 5\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colspan=\"2\" nameend=\"c13\" namest=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eModel 6\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eRTA partners\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.38\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.48\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.46\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.53\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.55\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e*\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-0.54\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLog GDP per capita\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.68\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1.37\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e*\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e1.22\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e37.50\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e38.06\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e37.69\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eLog GDP\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e11.37\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e11.38\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e11.40\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-19.87\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e*\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-20.52\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-20.08\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eWTO\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-11.50\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-11.42\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-11.50\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-20.92\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-20.92\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-20.94\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eDemocracy\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-20.64\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-17.51\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-18.05\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-6.69\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-6.74\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-6.71\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSocialist\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e40.13\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e40.59\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e40.56\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.75\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.74\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.75\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eObservations\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,770\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,776\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,770\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,770\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,776\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e4,770\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eF-stat for instruments\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2,147\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e3,915\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2,413\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e511\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e452\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e413\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSargan overid test\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e2.49\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e0.001\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eCountry fixed effects\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c6\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eNo\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c7\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c8\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eYes\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c9\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c10\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eYes\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c11\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c12\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eYes\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c13\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll the regressions include year fixed effects\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e*, **, *** indicate that the coefficient is statistically significant at the 10%, 5%, 1% levels, respectively\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSignificance levels are based on standard errors that are robust to the presence of heteroskedasticity\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInstruments used in each model\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eModels 1 and 4: Average number of regional trade agreements among the ten largest trading partners\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eModels 2 and 5: Predicted number of regional trade agreements from gravity model estimates\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eModels 3 and 6: Include both instruments\u003c/p\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":false,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":true,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"review-of-world-economics","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"rowe","sideBox":"Learn more about [Review of World Economics](http://link.springer.com/journal/10290)","snPcode":"10290","submissionUrl":"https://www.editorialmanager.com/rowe/default2.aspx","title":"Review of World Economics","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"em","reportingPortfolio":"Springer Hybrid","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false},"keywords":"regionalism, multilateralism, preferential trade agreements, events data","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7436838/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7436838/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eFor over 60 years, scholars have theorized about whether regional trade agreements would encourage countries to participate more in multilateral trade negotiations or would undermine those trade talks. There are theoretical arguments on both sides of this debate but little empirical work has been done because of the difficulty of measuring how committed countries have been to multilateralism. This paper presents a novel way to measure country cooperation with the WTO using an events dataset of news reports. Positive signals of cooperation with multilateralism include reports that a country praised the WTO, made appeals to it, expressed an intention to cooperate, or engaged in WTO negotiations or consultations. Negative signals, indicating a lack of cooperation, include reports of countries making demands, complaints, or threats toward the WTO or of countries rejecting WTO proposals. Using stochastic frontier analysis, fixed effects, and instrumental variables models, the paper estimates the relationship between measures of regionalism and country cooperation with the WTO. In this way, the paper provides one of the first tests of how regionalism affects countries’ commitment to multilateralism.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eJEL classification: \u003c/strong\u003eF10\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Did Regionalism Kill the World Trade Organization?","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2025-09-11 08:27:57","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7436838/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0},{"type":"decision","content":"Revisions needed","date":"2025-12-11T01:26:21+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"","date":"2025-09-03T19:48:55+00:00","index":0,"fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"","date":"2025-09-03T14:05:44+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorAssigned","content":"","date":"2025-08-26T03:26:13+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"submitted","content":"Review of World Economics","date":"2025-08-22T14:28:03+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"review-of-world-economics","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"rowe","sideBox":"Learn more about [Review of World Economics](http://link.springer.com/journal/10290)","snPcode":"10290","submissionUrl":"https://www.editorialmanager.com/rowe/default2.aspx","title":"Review of World Economics","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"em","reportingPortfolio":"Springer Hybrid","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"85302704-3caf-40d0-9bea-65e7eb040836","owner":[],"postedDate":"September 11th, 2025","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"under-review","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-03-08T04:02:38+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2025-09-11 08:27:57","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-7436838","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-7436838","identity":"rs-7436838","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"8U1c8b4HqxoKbykW_rLl7","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}